Production resources and capacity
Manufacturing finished products requires resources like tools, machines, labor, or even water and electricity. Each resource has a capacity; the amount of finished product it can produce at a time. Cin7 Core uses resource capacity to calculate how much time is required to complete a production operation, production run, and production order.
To manage a production run, you need to set up your resources and capacity. You can then assign costs to your resources, then plan timelines, schedule orders, and calculate the cost of production.
The Capacity Planner keeps track of available, allocated and consumed resource capacity.
Prerequisites
Advanced Manufacturing must be included in or added on to your subscription.
You should have set up the Factory Calendar.
You should have defined your shop floor and logistics path.
You should have set up your work centers and bins.
You will need the Advanced Manufacturing: Capacity Planner permission in order to add and edit resources.
Add a new resource
You can add and edit resources from the production setup menu. Each resource can have units in different shop floors, for example, skilled labor can have three units on shop floor A but 4 units on shop floor B.
Select Production from the main menu and go to the Setup section.
Select the Resources tab.
Click the + Add button to add a new resource.
Enter a resource name and unique resource code to identify the resource.
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Select a resource type.
Machine is for equipment and hardware
Labor is for workers (Cin7 Core users)
Other is for resources that don't fit either of the first two categories
Optionally, use Tags to categorize your resources.
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There are two options that affect capacity and cost calculations:
Infinite resource: Infinite resources are not limited by capacity but do have a cost. For example, utilities like water or electricity, where you can use as much as you need. You can't set capacity for an infinite resource.
Use all available resources: Some resources can speed up production by using multiple individual units. For example, three ovens can bake three times as much bread as one oven. For other resources, having more units available does not affect production times. For example, wood carving is a one-person job, and assigning more people will not complete the task more quickly, so this option does not apply.
Set resource capacity
Resource capacity is calculated based on the number of individual resources and the operational hours.
One resource can be made up of a single unit or multiple units, and found in one or more shop floor locations. For example, if you have two ovens in one shop floor location and a third oven in a second shop floor location, you can create one Oven resource using all three individual units.
Similarly, you can have one Labor resource, for example, Unskilled labor, with 6 different workers. Cin7 Core will assign production operations that use this resource to whichever worker in the group is available.
You can set resource capacity for each of your shop floor locations. By default, the resources use the operational hours and days from your Factory Calendar.
Select if Working on holidays or Working on weekends is allowed. For example, some machines can be left on unsupervised over the weekend. This will increase capacity compared to your factory calendar hours.
Optionally, Add custom hours to a shop floor and resource combination, if they do not use the default Factory Calendar hours. This will open a pop-up window where you can select start times, end times, and break times, including weekend days if you have selected this option. Custom hours are applied to all units of this resource at a shop floor.
Click the Number of individual resources for a location. This will open a popup window where you can add individual resources.
Click + Add or Add more items to add a new individual resource.
Enter a name for Machine and Other resources.
Select a Cin7 Core user for each Labor resource. This will give the user access to their production operations in the Cin7 Core MES application.
Optionally set operational and non-operational periods.
Operational: Select dates to start and end the operational period. If no date is set, the resource will be operational unless otherwise specified.
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Non-operational: Select dates to start and end the non-operational period. If a start date is selected without an end date, the resource will be non-operational indefinitely.
Save changes to finish.
Each shop floor will display their capacity per week of this resource, calculated as weekly operational hours x number of individual units. When you've finished setting capacity for your resources, you can set resource costs.
Types of resource
Before you start creating resources, you should know about how the types of resource work in Cin7 Core. There are three types you can assign to a resource:
Machine: Machine resources represent equipment and hardware.
Labor: Labor resources represent a specific, single user of your organization.
Other: Other resources represent any other resource, such as general overheads and utilities. You might also want to use this type for some labor resources.
Labor resources
Selecting Labor as your resource type will ask you to map each labor resource to a user in your organization. This is useful if you use the Cin7 Core MES application to carry out production orders. You can limit MES app users from seeing production operations that have not been assigned to them.
If you have labor resource with specialized skills, it is best to group them separately from unskilled labor so you can specify which type you need in the BOM. Some businesses prefer to make an individual resource entry for each member of staff, so they can pre-assign specific people to production at the BOM level.
We recommend not adding the same user to multiple resources, as this causes inaccurate capacity calculations.
You'll want to use the Other type of resource for workers if:
You have more workers than Cin7 Core MES users.
You don't use Cin7 Core MES.
Your labor resources swap and switch between groups, for example between skilled and unskilled labor.
Delete or remove a resource
Resources and individual resources can be deleted if they have not been used in any production BOM. Once a production order using that resource is carried out, you will no longer be able to delete the resource, but you can make it non-operational so it can no longer be used in production BOMs.
Delete a resource
Go to the Resources tab of the Setup page.
Delete a resource by clicking X Delete
Make a resource non-operational
Go to the Resources tab of the Setup page.
Open the resource and set the status to Non-operational.
Delete an individual resource
Go to the Resources tab of the Setup page.
Open the resource and click Number of individual resources.
Delete an individual resource by clicking X Delete
Make an individual resource non-operational
Go to the Resources tab of the Setup page.
Open the resource and click Number of individual resources.
Select a start date for the non-operational period.
Optionally select an end date for the non-operational period, or leave blank to make the individual resource permanently non-operational.
Attach documents and remarks to a resource
Use the Attachments tab to attach any instructions or documents that are needed for this resource.
Drop files in the specified area or click to upload them. The attachments size is limited to 32 Mb. All file formats are accepted except executable files: .exe, .msi, .app, etc.
Uploaded documents are shown with the name of the file, the upload date, and the user who attached the file.
Add remarks to a resource
Use the Remarks tab about a resource. You can't edit or delete a remark.
Type the remark into the field.
Click Add to save the remark. This will save the remark with the date it was added and the user who made it.
Editing resource capacity
Editing the start of the working week, weekend days, holidays, number of individual resources, finite or infinite status, and using all available resources will cause changes in the Scheduler and Capacity Planner. The newly calculated resource capacity will only apply to orders created or authorized after editing.
Orders that have already been released are displayed on the Scheduler as they were, but you will see a notification if resources are now overallocated.
View linked production BOMs
View which production BOMs use this resource from the Used in tab.